Conversational Grunts in English Home Page

These pages contain a number of audio clips illustrating the uses
of non-lexical utterances in casual English dialog.

The data and its significance is described in more detail in
Non-Lexical Conversational Sounds in American English, an article
in Pragmatics and Cognition
(abstract,
draft in pdf,
draft in html)

In the diagrams, each strip includes two tracks and a timeline. In
each strip the top track is one speaker and the bottom track the
other. Each track includes: a transcription, the signal, the pitch in
red, and the 26th percentile pitch level (horizontal blue dotted line).

The recording conditions for the various samples were not optimal.
In particular, the record levels vary across conversations and across
tracks, for some conversations exhalations sound very loud, and for
some conversations there is bleeding of sound from one track to the
other.

To listen to the data on your local system may require some
persistance and luck. On some systems Netscape does a better job with
audio, on other systems Explorer does better, and some installations
you may have to download the audio files and play them by hand. In
particular, if some audio sounds abnormally slow, your browser is
probably failing to handle stereo correctly. Also, you will probably
also do better with headphones when using a desktop with a proper
soundcard, but with external powered speakers when using a laptop.